I was having trouble after trouble with my perl installation on cygwin at my new job. CPAN was broken - refused to run make. I'd use it to get get modules, then cd ~/.cpan/build/module-dir; make && make test.... Had to work out the dependencies myself. Then cygwin/X stopped working. "Screw this, I'll just blow away C:\cygwin and start from scratch".

Half a day later, and I think I have most of the modules I had worked so hard to get installed the first time re-installed. CPAN is still a little funky (serves me right for keeping a "hand-me-down" computer instead of insisting on a freshly imaged box) but let me tell you that reformating and reinstalling is not always the best option :)

Since I grew up in East Tennessee and Southern West Virginia, I'm allowed to make Southern jokes. 'Course, now I live in a small town in North-central Pennsylvania - way North of the Manson-Nixon line - and there's more Rednecks around here than I every saw down south.

I voted for string eval. I hate string eval, in any language, because it's misused too often. There are just very few good uses for eval. And a double e flag counts as string eval. I wouldn't mind if string eval had some less obvious syntax. For the very rare valid uses it has, it wouldn't hurt having to go circles to evaluate code.

That's of course true, but it's more conciled (then, say, with do file). I'm also quite sure I'm sometimes using modules that use string eval somewhere.

Also, what I hate most is when eval is used more frequently then it should be, like evaluating the same code over and over again when it would be enough to call it just once to compile a subroutine, and require typically avoids this. (Not all uses of eval I hate fall into this category, I also dislike when eval is called just once per run unneccesarily, partly because it makes eval more known and people will use it in worse situations.)

"You'll never need more than 64K of memory&quot --
Allegedly, Bill Gates circa 1985 in an interview.

I say allegedly because after searching Google I couldn't
actually find the quote cited. I didn't try all that hard admittedly, but according to folklore "The Bill"
said that and later ammended that to say "You'll never
need more than 640K".

Here I sit with a laptop with 1Gb of memory and quite
frequently when I've started Apache, Tomcat, Postgres and
a couple of my development tools I notice my disk spinning
like crazy, check vmstat and sure enough I'm in swap hell.

The more things change... the more they stay the same.

UPDATE:

It vexed me terribly that I couldn't find the quote.
So I checked a few more places and discovered what I'd
suspected for a while. Apparently the quote is a
misattributed quote. On wikiquote I find
a page about Bill Gates and under the section
called appropriately enough "Misattributions"
I find the following quote:
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."

Still... I remember the day when we thought upgrading from
8K of RAM to 16K of RAM was something really really super.

I remember reading that in pc magazine, compute or some such 81-83 area he just flipped off to an interviewer who was harassing him on dos'es memory limits. I doubt he meant it and sounded annoyed by the response he gave. I doubt you will ever find a direct source, one the archives back then were nonexistent and 2 heck he could buy the reference to make it go away. Also I remember it as "no one will ever need more then 640k" when at the time 386-512 was the norm and 640 was a huge increase.

Their worst final words was a general who, after being warned that they were under fire, said, They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis-

It was a fun book. For instance their worst weapon ever was a Russian one in WW II where they trained dogs with bombs on their back to associate the bottom of tanks with food. Unfortunately they only had Russian tanks to train them with, and the dogs were capable of telling the difference between Russian tanks and German ones.

Their second worst weapon was a USBritish anti-tank grenade. The problem grenades had is that they'd hit a tank, bounce, then blow up a few feet away. So they designed one that was sticky so that it could stick to the tank and deliver the maximum explosion. Unfortunately it also stuck to the hand of the person throwing the grenade...

As I said, a fun book.

Update: Thanks to the anonymous monk for the correction. My memory must be faulty.

I reformatted my HDD, modified the partition table, go to reinstall XP...b00m, for some crazy reason, my cd-drive wouldn't read the XP install disc...that did it for me. I didn't have a spare disc and ended up on Linux.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other